By the 1750s Spain realized that California and particularly the Monterey Bay area urgently needed stronger defenses. Spaniards had established presidios and missions to prevent incursions by the English and the Russians into area previously explored by Sebastián Vizcaíno (1550?-1615) and others. Viceroy José de Gálvez (1720-1787) sought to extend the Spanish frontier to the upper northwest, a policy followed by his successor Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli (January 24, 1717-April 9, 1779).

During the 1760s and 1770s, the Spanish concentrated on finding overland routes from Arizona to California and founding missions and settlements there. Gaspar de Portolá (1723-1784), a Spanish military officer, and Father Junípero Serra (1713-1784), a Franciscan friar, founded the first of nine Franciscan missions in present-day San Diego in 1769. Portolá also established a fort at Monterey in 1770. Father Serra founded Misión San Gabriel on the Pacific coast in 1771, which came to be used frequently as a stopping off point for Spanish soldiers and settlers on their way to other locations. Juan Bautista de Anza and his group, for example, rested there briefly on their way to the presidio in Tubac, Arizona, on their return from their first march to Monterey in 1774.

Under Serra’s direction, the Franciscans provided religious instruction and taught European agricultural techniques to the local Native Americans. Indigenous tribes often celebrated religious worship and special occasions through dance, with or without masks. European clergy frequently misunderstood such rituals as demonic and banned them from mission life. This presented difficulties for Indians who came to the missions looking for a steady source of food, but who found the loss of their culture too hard to bear. Some, such as the Cochimí Indian Sebastián Tarabal (fl. 1770s), escaped from the San Gabriel mission and walked to the Spanish presidio of Tubac, Arizona. Tarabal was instrumental in helping Juan Bautista de Anza and this group find a land route from Tubac to Monterey, California.

At the time of his death in 1784, Serra’s nine missions claimed some 6,000 converts among the Indians. The Franciscan Fermín de Lasuén (1736-1803) founded California’s tenth mission at Santa Barbara. Ultimately, 21 Franciscan missions were founded in California between 1769 and 1823. The missions were the basis for a lasting agricultural economy on the Pacific Coast.

4. Early 19 th-century illustration showing Native Americans with elaborate body markings and hairstyles dancing at the San José mission.

5. The bronze church bells that adorned the missions in colonial California usually were cast in America.

6. Palou’s work is a major source of information about the lift and work of Father Serra.

7. Santa Barbara is the only mission in the California chain still under the control of the Franciscans without interruption since its founding.

8. Father Serra founded Mission San Juan Capistrano, the seventh mission that he established, in 1776. An attempt by Father Fermín de Lasuén to establish a mission in the same location a year earlier was unsuccessful.

Map of the California Coast and Missions. Illustrative Maps, Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier. Library of Congress. (1)